Paterno
  • Network: HBO
  • Series Premiere Date: Apr 7, 2018
Metascore
69

Generally favorable reviews - based on 19 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 12 out of 19
  2. Mixed: 7 out of 19
  3. Negative: 0 out of 19

Critic Reviews

  1. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Robert Lloyd
    Apr 9, 2018
    50
    The film is watchable, certainly, but also wayward. Its effects feel scattered, its points lost as the story looks here, looks there; Paterno has many things to show you, but less to say.
  2. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
    Apr 9, 2018
    50
    A drama about sexual abuse and institutional corruption might seem topical, but all Paterno offers its audience is a chance to re-experience the cable news cycle of yesteryear.
  3. Variety
    Reviewed by: Mekeisha Madden Toby
    Apr 6, 2018
    50
    The end result is a film that clumsily tries to sympathize with Paterno instead of the young boys he chose to ignore until it was too late. ... [Pacino] is less at ease with his take on Joe Pa, delivering a performance of a man just as uneven as the film it is named after. ... Riley Keough, Kathy Baker and Annie Parisse deliver strong performances as Ganim, Joe’s wife, Sue, and his daughter Mary Kay respectively.
  5. CNN
    Reviewed by: Brian Lowry
    Apr 5, 2018
    50
    Where Paterno feels somewhat hollow, as "Wizard of Lies" did, is by essentially joining this story late in the fourth quarter. Yes, it's interesting to watch Paterno's end as his family tries to rally around him, but there are too-few glimpses of Penn St. in his heyday, when he and others conveniently looked the other way.
  6. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Daniel Fienberg
    Apr 4, 2018
    50
    Paterno is a more distinctive-looking movie than a lot of these HBO biopics, though, again, it isn't really a biopic. Thin supporting characters, the strange structural choices and the still-elusive nature of several facts in the timeline make Paterno more of an introspective snapshot of a tragic moment of reckoning than anything revelatory.
  7. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: David Wiegand
    Apr 3, 2018
    50
    The script is weak and the direction is weaker, as Levinson tries to walk a fine line on the issue of Paterno’s involvement for the sake of the tacked-on finale. Fortunately, Pacino’s performance counterbalances the problems with the film, as do solid performances by Kathy Baker as Paterno’s wife, Sue, and Riley Keough as journalist Sara Ganim, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the sordid case.
  8. TV Guide Magazine
    Reviewed by: Matt Roush
    Mar 29, 2018
    40
    Director Barry Levinson fumbles in his latest collaboration with star Al Pacino. ... Paterno spends most of the movie stewing in irritable confusion. [2 Apr - 15 Apr 2018, p.11]
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Awards & Rankings

80
#80 Best TV Season of 2018
71
#71 Most Shared TV Season of 2018

User Reviews

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User Score
4.6

Mixed or average reviews- based on 24 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 24
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 24
  3. Negative: 10 out of 24
  1. mikemacdad
    Apr 10, 2018
    10
    This is an absolutely horrible story, but a story that has to be told. Joe Paterno was a great man, a great coach, a greatThis is an absolutely horrible story, but a story that has to be told. Joe Paterno was a great man, a great coach, a great husband...........but at the end of the day he had the ability to stop a child rapist and he chose to protect his kingdom over the moral and ethical easy choice. PSU cult members will always blindly defend him and that is disgusting.… Full Review »
  2. imthenoob
    Jan 16, 2019
    4
    Pacino does a great job but the film does little to offer any new insights into the man as he is dealing with the falling out of the scandalPacino does a great job but the film does little to offer any new insights into the man as he is dealing with the falling out of the scandal that brought down the college he built up. Instead, He comes off as a man who cares little about how things affected everyone else until he has to deal with his own mortality. And I wasn't a fan of how Paterno tried to put Joe in a better light than what he really was: He wasn't some ill-informed man that possibly knew more than he did, Which is what they tried to portrait in the film. He was a man that repeatedly covered up a scandal in order to save his own skin and the legacy he built.… Full Review »
  3. calhounite
    May 16, 2018
    10
    Powerful, exonerative portrayal of Paterno. Transformative. Depicts the heroic Paterno, not the excoriated Freeh Report one. The key is thePowerful, exonerative portrayal of Paterno. Transformative. Depicts the heroic Paterno, not the excoriated Freeh Report one. The key is the redress of Paterno's lawyer son when asks if he didn't hear about rumors. Supernal rebuke warning of the devastating damage that can be incurred by judging people in that manner. Pure anguish in realizing that this forbearance resulted in its own devastation. And makes clear that Paterno believed Sandusky had concocted his own image orbit through the Second Mile and wasn't a product of Paterno's. His remark that Sandusky had duped him along with scores of others, powerful figures, child professionals, exploiting that orbit resonates as ruefully sincere.

    Curley's email stated that Paterno wanted Sandusky to be confronted with the charge. What's wrong with that? That's basic to give a man a chance to explain. That would be a thought arising from the heroic Paterno.

    The question has never been whether or not Paterno believed McQueary. It is this. Did Paterno believe he did enough to set the judicial/police/social services investigative process in motion in order to arrive at the appropriate determination regarding Sandusky. It would be perfectly ok for Paterno to take a stance of utter detachment as long as HE BELIEVED HE DID THIS.

    Don't know. Won't never be known. The movie's inherent premise is that the answer is yes. Pacino's artistic portrayal weighs ever so slightly toward a self-recriminating guilt rather than a guilt arising from conscious knowledge of deliberate subterfuge. However, the outrage of society against Paterno is understandable as the answer appears on the surface to be no. Never asked again about the status of the presumably ongoing/completed investigation. Did in 1998. Didn't in 2001. Is the fact that Sandusky was a direct subordinate in 1998 but not in 2001 a sufficient reason?

    The movie's closing scene balances out its driving viewpoint. But this movie gives Paterno's life a chance to be defined by Paterno, not Sandusky. It uplifts Paterno, his family, Penn State, and the admirers of Paterno. Pacino's acting makes it possible. It is a masterpiece in the portrayal of different perspectives.    … Full Review »
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